March 21, 2008

Egypt: Part Three

Temples of Karnak & Hurghada

Friday, March 21st

After my previous day's adventure where I spent all day out in the sun exploring the Valley of the Kings (and contracting sunstroke in the process), on Thursday morning I decided to get up extra early and try to get most of my sightseeing done before the Egyptian sun got too high in the sky!

Here's the rad view of the Nile River in the morning from my balcony.

I grabbed a light starchy breakfast, and then hopped on a bus to travel about 3km out of Luxor to visit...

...THE TEMPLES OF KARNAK! Officially called "The Karnak Temple Complex," this place is, according to the interwebs, "the largest ancient religious site in the world." Here's a view of the entrance to the temple from a couple hundred yards away. It's so massive and surreal it's hard to believe that it's really an ancient ruin and not some Hollywood movie set.

The Temple consists of four sections (or precincts), but the vast majority of what is open to the public is part of the Precinct of Amun-Re. The temple was built right near the ancient city of Thebes by Pharaoh Amenhotep III around 1,350 BC (over *3,300 years ago!*).

The entrance to the temple is lined with 40 ram-headed Sphinxes and is known as "The Avenue of the Sphinx."

Here's a close-up of a couple of the sphinxes to show you the various states of disrepair! This one's busted up pretty badly.

The view of the "Great Forecourt" that you enter after passing through the Avenue of Sphinxes and the big fortress wall (pylon).

Here's an example of one of the boards that was posted to help give visitors some context to the different areas of the temple.

Like all the other ancient ruins in Egypt, not only is the size of everything mind-boggling, but the amount of detail-work is CRAZY. Pretty much every single surface of stone is covered in hand-chiseled hieroglyphics. Even wilder is that all of the building material is sandstone that was transported to the temple site from OVER 100 MILES AWAY.

Here's a view of the crumbling pylon wall that used to be one of the temple's main defensive walls.

And a slightly different angle of the photo above when it was explored by European archaeologists in 1858!

I don't really know what to write for a lot of the pictures. The place is just so incredibly massive and has so many different features all built at different times by different people for different reasons!

So I'm just going to post a bunch of the pictures I like.

The place is also totally littered with different pieces of carved stone in various states of restoration.

The structure on the left is actually a huge statue (probably about 10m or 35' ft) of Pinedjem, one of the temple's priests.

Another row of ram-headed sphinxes. These ones were inside the temple walls and they were in much better shape. Check out how each of them has a miniature little man under their chins!

There were sections of the temple where every single supporting column had a huge statue in front of it! Check out the guy walking in front providing scale!

While most of the site is "open-air," a few of the smaller, enclosed temple's roofs have survived and you can go inside them and get a sense of what the other rooms felt like when they also had roofs.

Check out the carved walls and how light came into the rooms via grated-vents high on the walls.

Check out how the sunlight catches the dust-filled air! It made for a very serious *Raiders of the Lost Ark* vibe.

I wandered outside of the main walls and found a HUGE area littered with crumbled pieces that were being cataloged and organized.

It's hard to believe that people can take something like this and reconstruct a temple wall or a column out of it.

See the temple walls all the way in the background? That's how big this field filled with fragments is!

After exploring outside, I re-entered the main part of the temple to check out the main attraction: The Great Hypostle Hall!

Here's a view of the Hypostle Hall from the outside. If you look carefully, you can see the rounded edges of the tops of the columns (hypostles) lining the hallway in the distance.

9:30am and the sun was already getting HOT.

The Hypostle Hall is CRAZY! It has 134 columns that are all about 70' feet tall!

Each of the columns is about 10' in DIAMETER!

It's hard to even describe what seeing this room in person is like.

Archaeologists estimate that each of the big rounded pieces on top of the columns weigh 7 tons! How did they lift each of them 70' feet in the air???

If you look at some of the huge beams that sit on top of the columns you can still see some of the original paint that used to be on top of all of the hieroglyphs carved into the stone!

After going through the Hypostle Hall, you enter another part of the complex that has a bunch of huge obelisks.

They're so tall that you can't take a picture of them without their perspective looking skewed and out of plumb.

View of the Hypostle Hall from the other side.

Another rad photo of what the Karnac site looked like in the mid-Nineteenth Century.

There are two obelisks still standing. Each one is around 100' tall!

Here's me (in my stylish hat...pow!) standing in front of the peak of one of the obelisks that's no longer standing upright.

Wandering around the outskirts of another section of the complex.

I took a lot of these kinds of pics to help me remember just how enormous the whole site is.

You can walk hundreds of yards outside of the main parts of the temple and there's still stuff to see.

A view of the two standing obelisks from the other side of one of the walls.

It's hard to believe this place is real, right?

It's the closest thing to a time machine around.

After a couple hours of walking around, I had seen most of complex and the sun was starting to get pretty brutal, so I walked back through the temple to try to find a car to take me back to Luxor.

I got back into town around noon, walked up and down the esplanade along the Nile and ate some lunch.

Afterwards, I went and checked out the small, but still worth seeing Museum of Mummification!

The place was filled with all sorts of different types of mummies and sarcophaguses.

And they had all sorts of reproductions of hieroglyph scenes depicting scenes of the afterlife and explaining what they mean.

Here's a close up of the hand-painted carved hieroglyphs! It's always so amazing to me to be able to see the actual brushstrokes on works of art this old.

After an hour or so in the Mummification Museum, I exited back onto the esplanade. I walked around and enjoyed the view (if you look across the Nile, you can see the mountains that make up one side of The Valley of Kings in the distance!) and decided that I had seen most of what I wanted to see in Luxor and that it was time to move on.

I sat down and decided that I was going to travel to Dahab to do some scuba diving next! Dahab is a small town on the east coast of the Sinai Peninsula. In order to get to Dahab, I had to go to a town called Hurghada, take the ferry from Hurghada to a town called Sharm el-Sheikh, and then from there, hire a car to Dahab. Got all that? So I set out to hit the town and try to figure out how to get to Hurghada!

Check out what the rest of Luxor looks like! The "touristy" parts of town and the waterfront esplanade are all very modern. But the vast majority of the town looks like this! Dirt roads and chaos!

All the buildings are stacked-box works in progress.

The sides of most of the streets are lined with trash and there are roaming packs of goats that EAT THE TRASH! It's equal parts adorable and terrible. Hahaha.

After wandering the streets for a while, I found a hotel that was able to hook me up with a bus that was leaving for Hurgada later that night. I had a couple more hours to kill before I had to leave, so I decided to check out the Luxor Ruins - that were built at the same time as some of temples of Karnac were. They were closed, so I was only able to admire them from the perimeter.

At 5:30pm, I went back to my hotel and was picked up in a van and taken to the Luxor bus station to wait for my bus to Hurghada. Got to watch the sun set over the fields in front of the Nile.

Hung out at the bus station for about and hour. The bus came just in time - otherwise I might have been drained-dry by the swarms of mosquitoes that arrived soon after the sun had gone down!

I heard all sorts of crazy stories about how Islamic Fundamentalists liked to hijack tourist buses headed to Hurghada from Luxor - but my hotel told me that they'd booked me on a "night bus" filled mostly with Egyptian nationals and that things would "probably be ok." Hahahah. Oooooo-kay!

The blue lines on the map represent my guess about the route we traveled, because as you can see on the map, there are any official roads that connect Luxor and Hurghada!

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Five and half BUMPY hours later, I arrived in Hurghada and got a taxi to take me to one of the few hotels listed in my book that looked like it'd still be open - a place called Al Arosa. I checked in a little after 1am, got a decent room that was WAY overpriced (100 EP!). Here's my best "Get a load of THIS room" face. You can tell the room is totally embarrassed by me calling it out.

After I dropped my bags, I decided to head out and see if I could find a place to grab something to eat, and maybe have a drink to settle my bus-rattled nerves. I walked about 2 km down the road from my hotel and found a little roadside bar where it looked like *everybody would know my name!*

I found a small table by myself, ordered a pizza and a big frosty mug of beer and was reading a book when these three characters came over and asked me if I wanted to join them! Who could say no to that? From L to R: My new friends Thomas, Maria and Mohamed!

Maria was from Sweden and approached me because she pegged me for a fellow Swede. She was a self-proclaimed "cougar" who came to Egypt on vacation after a terrible divorce, met Mohamed and fell in love and they'd been together for a couple years. They explained to me that they were working on getting Mohamed a visa so he could live in Sweden, but that everyone was skeptical about their love and thought it was some kind of scam to get a visa!

I ended up drinking and shooting the shit with these three until well past 3am. And on the off chance that anyone in Swedish Immigration ever reads this, I'm more than happy to testify on behalf of Mohamed and Maria's love! It's very real and they seem very happy together! ;)

Hahaha. I love this photo. I love making new friends when you least expect it!

Saturday, March 22nd

I woke up at 6:45am the next morning, showered, checked out of my hotel and hired a taxi to take me to the ferry port so I could catch the boat to Sharm El Sheikh (the southern-most tip of the Sinai Peninsula). We got the ferry and it was closed. My driver didn't know why, so we drove around to a whole bunch of other places and finally learned that all ferry service was suspended for the next week (and we never did find out why).

I literally couldn't comprehend the fact that the people that live in this town, a town that pretty much revolves around catering to the tourists that travel here to TAKE THE FERRY, didn't really think it was their business to know that they FERRY WASN'T RUNNING! Haha. I've since been told that this is a very "Egyptian" thing. Which isn't a criticism - it's just one of those things that is good to learn because than you can stop stressing out about it and learn to laugh about it and realize that it's the reason you're traveling in the first place.

I had the taxi drop me off at a hotel where I ordered this FUCKING AWESOME breakfast and researched my options.

Turns out, without the ferry running I only had two options: Go to the airport and take a twenty-minute flight from Hurghada to Sharm El Sheikh (represented by the two blue pins on the map above). Or, I could take a FIFTEEN HOUR BUS RIDE all the way up north by the Suez Canal, and then across the peninsula and south. (The route denoted by the red path!).

If you're a genius like me, you probably had already worked it out that flying would be WAY faster. So it seemed like a no-brainer until I called the airline and learned that all flights from Hurghada to Sharm el-Sheikh were sold out for the next three days! (Which, if you ask me, is PROBABLY related to the fact that THE FERRY WASN'T RUNNING).

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